Yes, the initial syncing and indexing can take a moment. I would recommend joining a single Pub or SSB room [1] to find people and grow your network organically. The large Pubs [2] have a lot of content to download and also follow bots (which you would have to block).
The Oasis SSB client [1] is a webapp which you open in the browser. Oasis (like nearly all SSB clients) is a JavaScript package which you can install via npm.
It's a German registered association (e.V.), i.e. it's not only a single company or person behind it. Funding is done by membership fees. As a member you also get insights (regular newsletter) into the financial situation, e.g. how much money is on the bank account.
True, but at least they now have an API for account creation (AWS Organizations) --- it was really painful in 2015/16 to script (in the browser!) all necessary steps for account creation (add credit card, remove it again [to switch to invoice], etc)
It's not mentioned in the post, but PostgreSQL is the prime candidate to replace your MySQL: "The World's Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database". We are happy users of PostgreSQL in Zalando since 2010 (we switched from MySQL).
Here some old slide deck (2013) where I briefly "ranted" about MySQL: https://www.slideshare.net/try_except_/goto-2013whyzalandotr...
I work at Zalando where we run hundreds of PostgreSQL database clusters on Kubernetes (on AWS) using our Postgres Operator (https://github.com/zalando/postgres-operator). This gives us some added flexibility, quick startup (e.g. for e2e), and the latest PG features. That being said, I would be careful to recommend any specific stateful workload approach without good understanding of the whole setup (true for whatever cloud/k8s/onprem environment).
I can recommend joining the CNCF End User community [1] as it allows exchanging experiences around common problems, e.g. developer experience in a mid/large org, regulatory requirements (there are some banks in the CNCF End User community), etc.
The CNCF End User community is a vendor-free zone, so you can also discuss and learn about experiences with certain vendors to have better insights before deciding on one ;-)
As the owner of the linked GitHub repo (also rendered on https://k8s.af --- thanks to Joe Beda), I highly encourage everyone to contribute their failure stories (I'm still looking for the first production service mesh failure story..).
Also be aware of availability bias: Kubernetes enables us to collect failure stories in a (more or less) consistent way, this was previously not easily possible (think about on-premise failures, other fragmented orchestration frameworks, etc) --- I'm pretty sure there are much more failure stories in total about other things (like enterprise software), but we will never hear about them as they are buried inside orgs..
[1] https://github.com/staltz/ssb-room/blob/master/FAQ.md [2] https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/Pub-Servers